(Almost) every Saturday we review all Kickstarter campaigns in the "Games" category in the next week. Any we think are notable for some reason are curated here. This is written from the perspective of people looking to buy games and game accessories that offer interesting mechanics or ideas.

We Backed

Sometimes you have to put your money where your mouth is. These are the campaigns we backed in this batch.

Space Pirate Dungeon Crawl caught my eye. This is a very low-budget project that's failed twice prior. Third times the charm here as they met their goal and still have 11 days left as of this writing. This looks like fun, if fairly standard dungeon crawl.

We are always interested in what new designers are doing with the co-op dungeon crawlers, so we backed. I wish there were better components, in particular the blank rooms are a bit boring. Some neat ideas here, and only $50 shipped to the US.

Board Game Campaigns

This Kickstarter is tremendously popular and managed to standout even with fierce competition from similar-looking board games from prior couple of weeks. This looks like it could be a lot of fun co-op adventure/worker placement.

This is made by Final Frontier Games. They had an equally successful Board Game kickstarter last year which has a 7.49 on BGG. Other than some disgruntled European backers (due to shipping), their prior customers seem happy.

The game costs $54 which is about right for a MSRP for this type of game. However, they say the MSRP will be $70. The deluxe version (which is KS exclusive) costs $64, which is high. The deluxe version replaces the cardboard resources with wooden ones. But does not offer metal coins. Metal coins set you back another $25.

Dice Settlers is a bag building game where you roll dice and buy upgrades. They call it a "4X" but I think it looks a bit more like a standard resource game since the extermination is pretty light (you can raid other player's camps with gun rolls.)

This is from David Turczi, the designer that did Kitchen Rush(7.6BGG) and Anachrony (8.2BGG). We backed and liked Kitchen Rush quite a bit, it had very innovative use of timers.

Overall this looks pretty fun, but this is wishlist / wait for retail. The deluxe is $75 and the regular is $50. The Deluxe includes neat houses and Stonemaier resources. No Kickstarter exclusives, so no FOMO on this one.

Giant box of Miniatures? Kickstarter exclusives? This is the FOMO Campaign (Fear of Missing Out) of the week.

Like Gotham Chronicles and 7th Saga, this game is only going to be available on Kickstarter.

Very cool miniatures...

The gameplay looks pretty heavy, and while it has a lot of unique mechanics, it isn't something that specifically appeals to us.

This is made by Tabula Games which had one other big Kickstarter like this called Barbarians: The Invasion, which has a 7.9 average on BGG. Looks like they did have a lot shipping issues in the last Kickstarter, but most people got their game and are happy.

This is interesting, because both of these games are readily available on Amazon as this Kickstarter is being run. It seems Queen is just using KS as a distributor? Well, anyway Shogun is 7.57 average on BGG and #126 All-Time rank. It is an updated version of Wallenstein. Added to our wishlist.

RPG-Related Campaigns

This project is a creative idea for DMs who improvise their dungeons. You can fill empty rooms with a set of randomly-rolled objects. The Kickstarter is successful, but I'm not sure how random (and basically worthless) items would be perceived by players, although it would certainly make the empty rooms more interesting.

I would have suggested some sort of accompanying source material to go with this dice set. Charts, and graphs similar to those that came with Goodman Game's D50 Kickstarter.

Total Party Kill makes good source books. I've played in their tournaments at Strategicon, and they have a lot of great ideas for supplements. I probably would have backed this one, but at $40 for the print edition (w/o shipping! and no PDF), it's just too expensive.

Miscellaneous

This is a fresh anime-ish take on postapocalyptic miniatures. This caught my eye because of the impending arrival of Mutant Crawl Classics and my need for miniatures for that game. Unfortunately, they are priced way too expensive (75 euro for six minis!) and aren't going to make their goal.

If it wasn't for the giant stack of unplayed skirmish games we have here at SGL studios, we would have backed this. I love the price of the package, I love the skeleton miniatures, and I really love this goblin vampire:

Looks like they've hit their goal, so hopefully we'll see more from them in the future.

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*None of the campaigns mentioned here are sponsored or influenced via payment, prize or other means. If we know or have a connection to someone running the campaign, we will mention it in the campaign notes. If there is a campaign you think should be mentioned here, please e-mail us and tell us what makes it special and we'll review!